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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 449-450



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Who Invented the Computer? The Legal Battle that Changed Computing History. By Alice Rowe Burks. Amherst, N.Y., and Oxford: Prometheus Books, 2002. Pp. 463. $35.

There is glory in becoming known as the inventor of something important. Consider John Napier, the first to stumble upon the concept of logarithms; trouble is, Joost Burgi developed a similar table several years earlier. Nor did Charles Babbage invent the difference engine for which he is famous; a German, Johann Helfrich von Müller, published the concept long before Babbage even began to think about creating calculating machines. Why are Napier and Babbage commonly associated with great inventions, rather than Burgi and von Muller? A partial, and overly simplistic, answer is that they are the ones who made the inventions a working reality.

Who Invented the Computer? champions the claim that John Vincent Atanasoff, once a professor at Iowa State University, was the inventor of the modern digital computer, not the many people—specifically, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert—who did much more to make it a working device. In order to understand the context, it is useful to know that there was a long-drawn-out lawsuit over a patent taken out by Eckert and Mauchly on the concept of the electronic digital computer. The eventual ruling was that the patent was invalid because of prior work done by Atanasoff. This was a very good decision because it allowed the developing computer industry to grow at a phenomenal rate without engineers always wondering if they were at risk of legal proceedings. However, it was decided on legal issues, not on what professional historians would consider the reality of the situation.

In reading this book, one wonders if John Mauchly once did something that sparked a lifelong animosity in Alice Rowe Burks. There are many lengthy quotations from the trial record followed by analysis wherein Burks disparages Mauchly for being unable to remember exact dates and events from thirty years past, implies that he was not entirely honest in his testimony, and comes very close to calling him a liar and a thief; if Mauchly were still alive, I believe Burks would have run the risk of being sued for some of the things she wrote. This is in contrast to the analysis following Atanasoff quotations, which is uniformly admiring (even when he could not remember exactly, either). It has to be admitted that Mauchly was not a good witness, perhaps even his own worst enemy, but Burks's one-sided treatment is distinctly unfair.

Now, before I am accused of being pro-Mauchly and anti-Atanasoff, let me say that they were both interesting and creative men, with Atanasoff perhaps being the better of the two. When it comes to the modern digital computer, however, the invention of a few electronic digital circuits, used in a single-purpose, nonprogrammable machine that never produced any [End Page 449] useful results, is not sufficient in my book to give Atanasoff credit as "the" inventor. Neither, incidentally, does Mauchly's conceptual work on ENIAC deserve that attribution. There were many, many people involved in creating this modern electronic marvel.

Burks falls into the trap of thinking that the person who invents something quite interesting can be considered the inventor of even more interesting applications. She properly insists that she is not talking about the invention of the general-purpose stored-program electronic digital computer, but about the creation of an electronic digital calculator, a term she quotes from one of my own earlier writings. I chose that phrase very carefully. Yes, Atanasoff's machine was electronic, it was digital, but it was a "calculator"—not what is, today, meant by the term "computer." To equate the two is like saying that the inventor of a horse-drawn farm wagon was also the inventor of the modern motor car: they both have a power source, they both have four wheels, they both carry people and things, they both have a system to...

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